Abstract

Ecologists have long been interested in ecological communities. The interactions within such a community, summarised by food webs, is thereby of high complexity.
The scope of this thesis is to understand the emergence of these complex food networks. To describe the assembly of these food webs the framework of allometric evolutionary food web models is used, which we use to face three conceptual questions regarding food web assembly: First, we ask whether assembled food webs are evolutionary static or if evolution is always present. Second, we investigate the influence of multiple resources in allometric evolutionary food web models. Third, we examine food web assembly in higher dimensional trait space. All our studies show that evolution is present in food webs and can manifest in various ways. In addition, the introduced minimalistic models exhibit a large food web variability,
which can also be observed in nature.